Friday, March 22, 2013

In Praise of the Negative

Rolling Stone has informed us that Pink Floyd,
in order to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the release of their
admittedly brilliant album "Dark Side of the Moon, has invited fans to
tune to their website this Sunday , March 24, in order to stream the record, in
full. I can't help but think this is less the gift to fans than the
band might think, since any committed fan of Pink Floyd likely already
owns the album and has been listened to
it relentlessly for decades; myself, I know precisely where every pop,
skip and hiss occurs on my long lost vinyl copy.

All told, this is one
of those records that has been around for so long and has been played so
often that I wish I could condemn it as nostalgia, but I can't. It is a
brooding, moody, poetic and richly textured end-of -the-dream concept
album , a masterpiece of disillusion that rivals, I declare, TS Eliot
and his beautifully distraught "The Wasteland".

There is in both the mesmerizing defeatism of their respective projects; the shoulder-shrugging and firm embrace of the will to live fully has never found better , more seductive expression, both poem and album. Refreshing in the music and lyrics of Pink Floyd, as well, was a what I think is an unmistakable for the working class; along among British Art Rockers, PF avoided verbal drag and double talking allusions and planted their narrations dead center in a a streaming disgust with the mess men have made of the world; politicians and corporations for being such greedy, short sighted exponents of the profit motif and the misery index, and the common people, for believing lies told them and willfully buying into a fantasy that will only kill them all, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly.

Although
I am sick unto death of ever hearing this album again, "Dark Side of
the Moon" is a keen and sufficiently angst-y expression of a
generation's loss of idealism. Their narcoleptic music and vaguely
saddened ruminations, in fact, are an extended
impression of a very bad drug crash, when the good vibes of acid and
pot became overwhelmed by the critical burn-through of meth-
amphetamines. The irony is that for a band that has lampooned, bemoaned
and besmirched regimentation with their mirthless minimalism, their goal
, with the live streaming, is to get the last three citizens of the
planet who haven't purchased the disc to buy it, finally, and to become a
nonconformist just as the rest of us have always been. Like minded free
thinkers.